A time in life

There come times in your life where you just want to give up. Whether its give up trying to lose weight, or be the perfect Mom, or run a half marathon. Or you just want to curl into a little ball and sleep for days because you can't figure out what the point of it all is. 

Don't get me wrong, I know what the point of it is!

She's the point. This feisty little, soon to be four year old is the point. Her questions and amazement are the point.

This wildly sweet 20 month old is the point. With his mumbled words and fearless nature, he's the point.

 But half the time I get so caught up in life I often miss THOSE points. Luckily I have this woman (Chris's Mom) near by that gives me enough of a breather that I get moments of clarity like these so I can remember the point.

My most recent source of frustration is our house. We were getting married, had been in Maryland for 8 months. Working new jobs. Tired of throwing money away on an apartment and so we bought. We bought a simple LITTLE townhouse as our starter home in 2006. What we bought that tiny little, fixer upper townhouse for then, could buy us a pretty cute single family now. If we weren't upside down on that little starter home, we could afford a pretty nice house with property now, especially since the market is now in our favor! But we're stuck.

This is what I want to do to the housing market! (Dang isn't she cute!)

 

 (This is my sweet little girls first Karate test, Holy crap when did my kid get big enough to take karate and speak Korean? Obviously she's effected by the housing market!)

But you know what? She is. She can't invite all of her friends to her birthday party because we don't have the room. She's inviting quite a large number, considering the size of our humble abode, but I didn't have the heart to tell her no to everyone. We'll make it work, albeit close!

 So by now you're thinking "At least you have a home Erin" and I agree. We are lucky. We have a home. Each child has their own bedroom (although Parker's is a glorified closet). We have no problem making our bills. We are very lucky. We are blessed. But it isn't our dream. We keep working harder and harder to reach our dreams but we keep hitting road blocks along the way and I keep wondering, when is SOMETHING going to give??

You like what I did there don't you? Kinsley made it give!  She broke through. HA I sleigh me!

I know God has a plan for our family. I know he has a direction for us to go in and just because we're stuck in a house that's too small and too old and still needs too much fixing that we don't have the time or money to put into it... there's a reason we're still here. Maybe to make us appreciate what we do have. Maybe to test us (because Lord knows that house is starting to test me with two crazy kids, two annoying dogs, and my love for entertaining). Maybe it's because something better is coming at just the right moment and if it happened now it would be too soon.

We bought this townhouse too soon... one more year and we would have paid at least $30,000-40,000 less than we did and we would have been able to move by now. So now I need to be patient and know there's a time and it's not always going to be MY time. But if you know me, patience is not one of my attributes. So pray for us. Not that we get a house, or win the lottery (although that would be okay with me) pray that we find contentment and happiness. Pray that we stop looking at what we don't have or could have and start looking at what we do have. Pray that it stops feeling like a beating (not just about this house but life in general) and starts feeling like what it is... a blessing.

 

We're the one in the middle... this is circa 2009, improvements have been done since then~